Whenever I accidentally watch an episode of Made in Chelsea (MIC), I am suddenly overcome by a suffocating morbid dread. The overwhelming thought that I and everyone I have ever loved is going to die. As I watch the vapid, the vacuous and the vain, I feel more keenly the icy hand of death clawing more urgently at my shoulder. I am awoken to the transience of existence, the flickering, fleeting brevity of our time and I think: what in the name of Kensington Roof Gardens am I doing? How is it that I have been given this greatest gift of consciousness and I am wasting it? I am pissing it away against a plasmarised vision of banality. No more, please no more.
MIC is an unholy reminder of the imminence of our deaths and serves as a proverbial defibrillator to shock us back into reality. To awaken us from the stupor of junk-mail culture and spur us on to get as far away as possible, and actually do something. To take life by the Caggie Dunlops, and live it.
Now every time the controller slips and the television is turned to MIC I will stand erect and shout, “not in this life!” And I will rush outside and taste that precious air, and in that moment I shall know that I’m alive. Unless it’s raining, then bollocks to it.
The reason I mention this is that there is something wrong. People, including me, are allowing the sands of time to slip through their fingers and become lost forever in a desert of what ifs.
People on their death beds rarely regret the things they have done, rather they are haunted by the things they never did. The things they could, the things they should, and the things they will never get to do. So bloody well get out and do them because right now is the only chance you get.
Bob Dylan said that success is a man getting up in the morning and going to bed at night and in between doing exactly what he wants. This is straight from that aphoristic wisdom of rock and roll that helps us to grasp at life’s slippery tendrils. To truly realise that oft repeated but quickly forgot horatian dictum, “carpe diem.” When was the last time that you carped the diem?
